Of the many populations at risk in these corona times, the homeless are among the most vulnerable. Without shelter, having to do without personal protective equipment, often without health insurance and unable to limit contact with strangers, the risk of infection is very high. The emergency measures taken by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government included the closure of many public spaces, indoors and out, depriving them of access to the few spaces of survival. . This ethnographic article outlines how an older group of homeless men responded to the risk of infection and inconsistent government efforts to address this issue. Finally, we examine the response of civil society organizations to compensate for weakness of the government’s response.

Japan's ruling class's wartime project of militarisation and imperialist domination is well-documented in the English language but the active resistance of the working class and general population is less well-known. Sugiura Masao's Against the Storm covers the activities of printworkers in the period of Japan's increasing militarisation, particularly from the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937 to the surrender in 1945. Further context is provided with reference to earlier periods, times when legislation had begun to place restrictions on the political and civil rights of the population.

In the early stage of the coronavirus outbreak in China, social media were bursting with anger and desperation. Many pleaded for medical help, called for public attention to the unattended and asked for accountability for local officials who failed to respond to the public health crisis in time. But with the epicenter shifting to Europe and North America, a series of social media tactics, highlighting China's successful containment efforts, while disparaging foreign countries' responses, and spinning the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, facilitated a nationalist takeover of social media sites in China.

The Opening Ceremony under the guidance of popular film director Yamazaki Takashi will almost certainly earn it applause overseas, particularly by viewers and writers eager to take stock of a country's creative talents in this once-every-four-years fantasia. As the stuff of international politics goes, it will be mostly inconsequential and harmless, and it will likely be good fun. But it also offers the chance to explore how a ceremony can reproduce moral and historical claims that remain largely unexamined, and how closed to challenge and contestation an Opening might be.

Nominally fought over competing interests in Korea and Manchuria, the Russo-Japanese war had a significance that far outweighed its strategic reach. Central to its legacy was its outcome - the defeat of an old European Great Power by an aspiring non-European imperial state. This outcome inspired a great deal of racial and geostrategic introspection, whilst intensifying concerns in the West about ‘Yellow Peril’ that would one day overthrow European dominance. This article argues that the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on racial thinking in Japan was as significant as it was abroad, to the extent where the conflict was understood by key intellectuals as nothing short of a race war. These figures, including political philospher Katō Hiroyuki, historians Taguchi Ukichi and Asakawa Kan'ichi, and biologist Oka Asajirō, identified the outcome of the conflict as evidence that the established Eurocentric hierarchy of races was wrong. Japan's success, they argued, showed that the Japanese race (distinct, it should be noted, from other Asians) was at least on a par with their white rivals. Furthermore, some argued that it was in fact the Russians who should be excluded from the upper echelons of the racial hierarchy. Their work reveals the profound impact of the events of 1904-1905 on Japanese self-perception and confidence - and reveals the roots of racial attitudes that continue to bedevil the nation in the 21st century.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, became one of the most famous and influential public figures in the world following the emergence of the revolutionary new weapon, the atomic bomb, which was dropped over two Japanese cities in August 1945. Soon, however, he would be harassed by a Hollywood studio for permission to portray him in a big budget movie, and shadowed by the FBI because of his links to former Communists.

Violent extremism in Southeast Asia did not increase as a result of Covid-19 despite exhortations from ISIS leaders to attack, nor was counter-terrorism capacity seriously undermined by the need to divert funds and personnel. Fears remained that the pandemic might increase interest in biological weapons or cyber-attacks; create a favourable climate for recruitment as economic hardship deepened; or lead to prison uprisings. Of these the concern about prisons was most justified.

“If our sin as scientists was to make and use the atomic bomb,” Leo Szilard, famed physicist would admit, “then our punishment was to watch The Beginning or the End.” Szilard's exposure to the 1947 MGM movie, however, went far beyond merely enduring a viewing of the first Hollywood drama about the creation and use of the bomb. The previous year he had traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles to offer his input on key scenes, then signed a contract agreeing to be portrayed in the movie–and after much cajoling, convinced Albert Einstein to sign his own approval.

The IOC’s myopic push for increasingly elaborate Olympics increased the size of the Olympics and raised the staging costs, which outpaced revenue and discouraged bidders. As the Olympics have become very costly mega events, only rich megacities like Tokyo can afford to host them. Advocates of the Olympics remain convinced that the Olympic expenditure is an investment that the city will ultimately recoup, but this is unlikely. For construction companies, however, the games are a bonanza.

Crash Landing on You (Sarang-ui bulsichak), a 16-episode drama on South Korean cable channel tvN in 2019-20 that was also released on Netflix, has drawn broad attention for its storyline featuring a South Korean heiress stranded in North Korea who falls in love with an elite military officer. Though the show invokes many formulae of South Korean dramas, it also offers a detailed portrait of North Korea, and, as such, is a crucial text for evaluating ongoing change in South Korean popular representations of its neighbour. Indeed, given the concerted use of North Korean backdrops in Crash Landing on You and the size and global extent of its audiences, the show is likely the most noteworthy South Korean popular culture representation of North Korea yet produced. In this article, we first consider the drama and its depictions of North Korea and then discuss groupings of Korean and international responses to the show. In doing so, we extend our work on the confluence of South Korean pop culture representations of North Korea with developments in information and communication technologies and the surrounding media environment. We also add to a growing body of scholarship that situates South Korean dramas within broader social and political contexts.

Abe Shinzo has exercised extraordinary influence over the Japanese state. On 20 November 2019, as he passed his 2,587th day in office (over eight years) he became modern Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister. But what are the sources of this longevity and what will be the consequences for Japan and the Asia-Pacific? Probably few, even among his close supporters, suggest that he has been exceptionally popular. His parliamentary dominance rests on a combination of political apathy, absence of credible opposition, and a well-funded political party machine honed by more than half a century of Cold War and post-Cold War parliamentary dominance. From a narrow electoral base, during his second term of office that followed the general election of December 2012, Abe moved to concentrate an unprecedented measure of control over the levers of state, nominating his close associates to special policy advisory committees and to head the Cabinet Legislative Bureau, the National Security Council, the Bank of Japan, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the national broadcaster (NHK). He also paid close attention to the cultivation of the major national media groups. In October 2017 the support of just 17.9 per cent of eligible voters (48.2% of the vote) in the small seat electorate division was sufficient to secure the Abe camp 61.1% of the parliamentary seats. In September 2018 Abe extended his party leadership position to three terms (nine years from 2012) and so anticipated steering the country through the 2020 Olympic Games and beyond to the adoption of a new constitution before retiring in glory late in 2021. Coronavirus upset that design by causing the Olympics to be held over for at least a year, but early signs were that Abe would turn that delay to his political purposes.

Over the past decade, the concept of the “uncanny valley” (bukimi no tani) coined by roboticist Mori Masahiro (b. 1927), has appeared in over ten thousand (English-language) articles and chapters, Briefly, the concept presumes that the scary surprise of realizing that, say, a flesh-and-blood human was actually a zombie will send one tumbling into a valley of existential queasiness. As an application, this effect was hypothesized by Mori as grounds for avoiding the design and manufacture of humanlike robots or androids. In this edited and augmented excerpt from chapter 6 (Cyborg-Ableism beyond the Uncanny [Valley]) of my book, Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2018), I interrogate the 'uncanny valley“ hypothesis, which has been accorded an almost ”natural-law“-like status. I critically examine Mori's original 1970 essay in Japanese and draw attention to some of the problems posed both by translating bukimi as ”uncanny“ and by treating the ”uncanny valley“ as a self-evident truism.

In the context of the global increase in displaced people, spiking to nearly 80 million in these corona times, Japan has also seen a dramatic increase in the number of applications for refugee asylum since 2010. Despite increasing numbers of applications, Japan has not increased its refugee recognition rate. Unable to return home to sure persecution when rejected, many refugees end up in Japanese detention centers once their visa expires. Like jails, hospitals and detention centers everywhere, detention centers in Japan are crowded and dangerous and unable to protect the detainees inside. Japan has been slower than many other countries to take precautions, including temporary release. This paper outlines some of the policy shifts that have led to this dangerous situation, the conditions of anxiety inside the detention centers themselves in Tokyo and Ibaraki and the problematic situation of “provisional release” of some detainees into a corona-infested Japan without any safety net or protection. We hope to not only point out the immediate danger of infection under COVID-19, but also the larger dynamic of using detention to manage a refugee asylum system that has proven to be ineffective and unjust.

Japan has so far seen foreign workers as a stop-gap solution to intensifying labor shortages, as manifested in the labor import scheme for the Olympics. However, due to a gathering demographic crisis, the labor shortage will not disappear when the Olympics ends. Japan needs to create a social environment where immigrants can more easily fit in. Perhaps the 2020 Olympics, with all its promises and challenges, will be an opportunity for Japan to envision a new form of society and redefine its national identity from an exclusively monoethnic monocultural one to an embracing, inclusive and diverse one.

The World Bank's “International Poverty Line,” a politically driven standard, obscures the reality that, in East Asia as elsewhere, poverty is increasing alongside enormous wealth for the richest ten percent. The COVID-19 pandemic is driving tens of millions more people into poverty in East Asia than would otherwise be the case, challenging all governments to meet the crisis where it most counts: in health care, food, aid to small businesses, and income. For that to happen, however, requires a dramatically different approach to economic globalization by governments and international lending agencies. Two events, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, are playing havoc with efforts by international organizations to reduce poverty. The United Nations, the World Health Organization, and numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are all engaged in poverty-reduction programs, but the World Bank stands out for obstructing a clearer understanding not just of how poverty should be defined, but also of what it takes to lift people out of it.

This essay focuses on the historical memory of Korean repatriation in postwar Japan, by examining the commemoration of the Ukishima-maru incident in which thousands of forced laborers died when their ship sank after striking a mine. We show how local memory activists in Maizuru and Shimokita mobilised to present an alternative narrative to that on display at the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum which overlooks Korean repatriation. It shows how despite limited means they were able to build a network of memory activists that transcends local and national borders.

This short essay is a personal reflection by a socio-cultural/medical anthropologist of Japan with a long-standing research interest in hikikomori (social withdrawal). I re-examine the notions and the roles of so-called “experts.” Then, I will situate the “new normal” under the pandemic in relation to definitions of hikikomori. I conclude by sharing my hopes for a renewed sense of sociality in and beyond the pandemic age.

The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of a pattern: the high age of imperialism had divided the globe into two spheres, one for the colonizers and the other for the colonized. Various justifications were used to rationalize the colonial venture, one of these being the idea of racial superiority. Geopolitical and scientific developments gave birth to the idea of an unbreachable gulf between the superior “white race” and the inferior “colored races.” While circumstances in the colonies seemed to confirm that idea, Japan had, through a process of modernization, reached the civilizational level of the Western powers, thereby becoming a racial anomaly. To cope with this anomaly, the nations in the West had to devise a negotiation zone, in which the Japanese were temporarily granted privileged racial status without upsetting the racial status quo.

This essay takes a constructionist approach to Representation Studies, examining Fukuzawa Yukichi's elementary geography textbook Sekai kunizukushi (1869) and its hierarchical images of the West, juxtaposed against representations of Japan as framed by concepts of race and civilization. Furthermore, it compares these images to their “recycled” versions as constructed in the vast extra-textual apparatus of Fukuzawa Yukichi no Sekai kunizukushi de sekai wo manabu (2017), a recent translation of Fukuzawa's textbook into modern Japanese. The move to reintroduce older textbooks is here examined as an “imagebuilding” strategy, one that allows the (re-) construction of influential images in support of an ideological agenda.

Representations of blacks in Japan continue to be problematic even when the media itself, a prime purveyor of racial misrepresentations, attempts to address the issue. This has become evident in its coverage of global Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police in the United States. While protests have occurred in a number of Japanese cities, mainstream coverage has ignored them and remained focused on those demonstrations that have taken place abroad. While these demonstrations have prompted a reexamination of anti-black racism in the United States and Europe, the Japanese media has largely avoided introspective discussion of its domestic manifestations, despite its prevalence on the internet, social media, and television, including corporate mainstream news broadcasts that have feebly attempted to examine the issue.